David Cushman on measuring sentiment

The last few years have seen an accelerating acceleration of interest in and use of social sentiment and analytics. Yet the empirical evidence in the field finds that at best the indicators gleaned from this data provide insight only a bit better than listening to background noise. David Cushman adroitly addresses the issue and locates the utility of these types of metrics against a much more comprehensive (and strategic) matrix of factors.

The structural biases in sentiment are but one factor in leading to the unreliability of pure measures of its traditional constituents .